Back Elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unidos en California de 1988 Spanish Élection présidentielle américaine de 1988 en Californie French Wybory prezydenckie w Stanach Zjednoczonych w Kalifornii w 1988 roku Polish 1988 United States presidential election in California SIMPLE
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| Turnout | 72.81% (of registered voters)  2.12 pp 53.51% (of eligible voters) 5.57 pp[1] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Elections in California |
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The 1988 United States presidential election in California took place on November 8, 1988, and was part of the 1988 United States presidential election. Voters chose 47 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
California voted for the Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush, over the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis by a margin of 3.57 percent. Bush won forty-four of the state's fifty-eight counties, but the election was kept close by Dukakis’ strong performance in the Bay Area and his victory in Los Angeles, the state's most populated county. Also, Dukakis won at least 31% of the vote in every county and at least 40 percent in forty of them. Much like Vermont in the same year, California was seen by observers as a swing state in this year's presidential election cycle due to fairly close polling.
California weighed in for this election as 4.2% more Democratic than the nation at large. As of the 2024 presidential election, this is the last presidential election in which the state of California was carried by a Republican candidate. From the next election onwards, California would, like fellow West Coast states Oregon and Washington, transition from being swing states to voting consistently for Democratic candidates, forming a "blue wall" of sorts over the next three decades. In fact, Oregon and Washington even voted for Dukakis in the election, making this is the only presidential election since 1948 that Oregon and California voted for different candidates, as well as the last presidential election where California voted to the right of both Oregon and Washington. Bush is also the last Republican to carry the following counties in a presidential election: Monterey, Napa, Sacramento, San Benito, and Santa Barbara. Additionally, he is the last Republican to win any county in the Bay Area (Napa), the last Republican to secure at least one-quarter of the vote in San Francisco, and the last Republican to secure at least 40% of the vote in Los Angeles County.
Bush became the first Republican to win the White House without carrying Sonoma County, a Republican stronghold for most of the 20th century,[2] since Benjamin Harrison in 1888, as well as the first to do so without carrying Los Angeles County, a bellwether county from 1920 to 1984, since Rutherford Hayes in 1876. Due to Bush's victory in California, this was also the most recent presidential election when the state of Texas would not be the biggest electoral vote prize won by the Republican candidate, and likewise for the Democratic nominee in regards to California, which instead was New York.
At the beginning of the campaign season in 1988 Dukakis had held a 16 point lead in California that shrunk as time went on, by the time Dukakis and Bush debated in los Angeles, Bush took a high single digit lead thereafter nearly every single poll had the state as tossup or leaning Bush
- ^ "Historical Voter Registration and Participation in Statewide General Elections 1910-2018" (PDF). California Secretary of State. Retrieved May 5, 2022.
- ^ "Opinion: The GOP's Long Slide into Irrelevance in California". Times of San Diego. July 3, 2018. Retrieved May 31, 2021.